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MYSTERY 
M OF PEACE 

OEOROE T. SMART 







Class S=z-J- — 

Book- * — 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT; 



THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 




THE 

MYSTERY OF PEACE 



BY 



GEORGE T. SMART 

Author of " Studies in Conduct " 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 





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Copyright, 1909 
By Luther H. Cary 



CI.A 246092 
AUa 31 1909 



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CONTENTS 

Page 

Keeping the Peace 7 

II 

The Foes Within 13 

III 

The Beatific Vision 22 












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" That blessed mood, 

In which the burthen of the mystery, 

In which the heavy and the weary weight 

Of all this unintelligible world, 

Is lightened" 

— Wordsworth. 



THE 



MYSTERY OF PEACE 



T\ 



KEEPING THE PEACE 

IS it not strange, after so many Christian cen- 
turies, that men are so generally unacquainted 
with peace? And yet this mystery is one of 
the final gifts bestowed upon humanity by the 
great Teacher. In some of the rare moments 
of personal life men have gained peace; but 
they have not learned the secret of keeping it. 

To-day we seem to have fallen short even of 
the calm of classic antiquity. We may be 
more earnest in our morality than the pagan 
life that antedated Christianity, — at least we 
are apt to hope so, — but we clearly miss some 
of the goods this life possessed. Who is calm 
enough now to embark upon enterprises of 
the pith and moment these older men at- 
tempted ? Who among our sculptors carves a 
face that cheers the centuries ? or what archi- 
tect knows the secret they did of quantum 
sufficit? 

There was a wonderful heroism in those 
elders of a far-off time who, living in a world 
that needed spelling out much more than ours, 
yet took up strong positions and refused to 
leave them for nothing. Measuring them- 
selves against the universe, they saw they 
[7] 




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THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 

must take it by strategy, and like wise men 
they chose their own place for battle and won. 
When we look upon some of the statuary they 
carved for us, and then on the seamed faces of 
the men of the Renaissance, we instinctively 
feel that the earlier works were those of chil- 
dren, or of men. We are no longer children; 
but we have not yet grown to be men ! 

For notwithstanding our disclaimers we 
men of to-day are not personally hopeful. We 
come back again to our daily life with a sigh, 
after walking a cathedral cloister. We grow 
restive as we think of the confused world we 
have to live in ; and sometimes, God forgive 
us ! we would exchange it for the hard condi- 
tions of feudalism, if we could only be absolved 
from making our own destiny. Our peace is 
not delivered to us ; it is not even made. 

On the whole, thoughtful religious people 
are not excessively "happy." More than any 
they feel the weight of "this unintelligible 
world." And the worst of it is that they think 
it their duty not to forget this serious pressure. 
They are likely to speak of the hopeful as 
" shallow " optimists. But are there not "shal- 
low " pessimists ? Which is the truer view of 
life, — health or sickness, salvation or sin, life 
or death? Is life, as a great cynic said, "the 
perpetual possession of being well deceived" ? 
— or is Paul right when he says that it hath 
not entered into the heart of man to conceive 
its benedictions? The answer, judged by 
history, is wholly with Paul; for the answer 
is : life still goes on. 

As a matter of fact, our attitudes, even to the 
[8] 

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deepest matters, are extremely conventional. 
We never take our own line if we can help it. 
We always fall back on other people's exam- 
ple, as Shakespeare fell back on other people's 
plots. We speak fashionably when we speak 
ill of life, and we are often in good company as 
we do so. We have so many examples of 
doubtfulness to imitate that we totter our- 
selves. Life has indeed been colored by ill, 
by pain, by disaster, by the tragic. But these 
aspects have been made insistent, not so much 
by those who faced them in reality, as by those 
who observed from a distance. While several 
generations of Christians bore the last agonies 
of persecution gladly, the feebler race that 
came after, missing the joy of heroism, sad- 
dened the pages of history as they wrote 
them. Monasticism also injected a "melan- 
choly black bile" into men's blood. Then, 
too, for those of English descent there was the 
gloom of Puritan introspection to come 
through, — a gloom turned into magnificent 
art by Hawthorne, yet still gloom, affrighting 
us with shadows when we give ourselves to it. 
So popular was this view, and so imposing, 
that even worldly men felt they must imitate 
it. Young rather drearily intoned his "Night 
Thoughts," and John Donne, peering into the 
corruption of the charnel-house, wailed with 
fantastic realism of a "bracelet of bright hair 
about the bone"; while the gayer Herrick 
could momentarily lament — 

" In this world, the Isle of Dreams, 
While we sit by sorrow's streams, 
Tears and terrors are our themes." 

[9] 



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Thus overbusy have men been with sin and 
death ; and their unhappy zeal has put together 
a long historical and literary background for a 
dubious view of life. 

Meanwhile the question arises, Is there a 
fundamental agony in things, or is it in our- 
selves ? If it is in things, why have not men 
sorted it out and rejected it ? Some, indeed, 
have tried to do so, but they have found, as 
Socrates did, that "the fact is there is some 
subtlety in the texture of things." Things are 
so woven together that the thoroughgoing have 
been obliged to throw away everything to get 
rid of the troublesome part. This is what the 
Stoics have always done. With Aspasia they 
try to stand "not only above slavery, but above 
splendor." And when successful they have 
been solemn and shivering figures in a world 
stripped of everything down to the elements. 
But did they ever succeed? One doubts it. 
There is a "thinly sealed volcano" under the 
cool pages of Marcus Aurelius, and what 
means Swift's inhuman resolution "not to let 
children come too near me"? This was his 
impossible way of arming himself against the 
delicious pains of affection ; but his own armor 
wounded him as much as any man of his age, 
perhaps more. 

Misery, thank God ! is not in things ; this 
world is the world of the same absolutes for us 
all. Earth's ultimate presentations are im- 
placably the same to each one. But the way 
we front them makes the result to differ. We 
may rage against life with the Titanic revolt 
of Byron, or we may accept it with the "wise 
[10] 



THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



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passiveness" of Wordsworth. To-day we 
know perfectly well that Wordsworth's view 
was the better one. It is hard for men to kick 
against the goads. 

Even when, as is blessedly the case, the 
things that we most tremulously respond to 
are moods thrown over life by ourselves, as 
affection or imagination, these moods are not 
solidly built into life, unchangeable or irref- 
ragable. They always need translating again 
into the mood of the day, whose hours are a 
mesh to catch gossamer delights. Our old 
joys and memories, therefore, need keeping in 
repair. It is the present mood that matters 
when I think over twenty years of friendship. 
One misinterpretation to-day, or one false ac- 
cent, may spoil forever that excelling wonder. 

The thing that breaks the peace is not the 
obstructive fact or person, it is the heart, and 
the way that beats level to life or below its 
horizons. We talk about "hard facts" and 
"historic " truths as though they were irre- 
ducible and irreversible. There is, however, 
the mood in which we approach them. We 
may espouse a "fact" or deny it, and what a 
difference it makes to our day ! Take Keats' 
attitude to a Grecian urn, when he sings, 
"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness," 
and compare that with the mood of a modern 
Greek peasant who uses the priceless statuary 
in his field as a target for rifle-practise ! Even 
great persons are not commanding enough in- 
variably to dominate man's mood. We im- 
agine a man of Tennyson's stature would have 
commanded subjection in every case. But, 
[11] 



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no ! Hear what the old gardener who worked 
for him said to a visitor: — "'That Shake- 
speare's a great poet, isn't he?' 'Yes.' 
*And this Tennyson 's a great poet, isn't 
he?' 'Yes.' 'Then,' driving his spade into 
the clod, 'I don't think nothink o' neither 
of 'em.' " 

The real agony is in us. There is, in the 
schools, a doctrine that no object can ever 
be taken into thought without the approach 
being made to it by a set of thoughts that 
are "warm" to it. Now there is an apper- 
ceptive mass of feeling also in us that either 
"warms" to the world or fears it. If we are 
"warm" to it, we are brave and hopeful; 
if "cold," we are apprehensive. I knew a 
woman who said she always lived appre- 
hensively. She had everything to satisfy 
her, — health, wealth, troops of friends; but 
she could not look upon to-morrow without 
a shudder. Out in the world somewhere 
she felt that demonic powers were preparing 
catastrophes for her. The best she could do 
was to arm herself to resist. 

Ah, that is the crucial error ! Peace is not 
a coat of mail that automatically blunts the 
"slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." 
Nor is it a capital we can fall back upon to pay 
the deaf creditor agony. Peace is made, kept 
in repair, — this is the condition on which it 
can be held. Blessed are the peacemakers, 
for they shall be called the sons of God. How 
can men be sons of a God whose creative 
energy is infinite, unless they, too, create ? 



[12] 






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THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



n 

THE FOES WITHIN 

IT has often been assumed by careless readers 
of the New Testament that demonic posses- 
sion was peculiar to the years of our Lord, or 
that if we have to-day anything at all like the 
same troubled phenomena we shall find them 
in the vulgar abysses of "spiritism," or the 
squalid world of imbecility. In truth, we have 
demonic possession more than ever to-day; 
for the ills of men are growing less physical 
and more and more mental and spiritual. 
And these spiritual ills grow increasingly deli- 
cate and superfine. These are the foes of our 
own household always conspiring against our 
peace. If, therefore, the great Master cast 
out devils, is it not indispensable that his disci- 
ples do the same, and that the work begin at 
home ? 

One of these contemporary miseries is the 
mood of Hamlet. On the whole, one would 
hardly call our age a Hamlet age. But then, 
we should hardly call Shakespeare's age one 
either ! Yet it was in the spacious times of 
great Elizabeth that the mood was worked 
out supremely in literature. And this su- 
premacy is inevitable in any cloudless view of 
human life; for the mood is found precisely 
most developed among imaginative people. 
If one gathers half a dozen thoughtful men 
[13] 



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and women together, it is not long before you 
hear some of the stock reverberations of the 
day. You catch above the hum of conversa- 
tion such words as "responsibility," "com- 
plicated," "hurry," "strenuous," "pathetic," 
and others constituting a list of neurasthenic 
vocables as long as the obnoxious list that Ben 
Jonson made his rival Marston vomit in the 
play of The Poetaster. To judge by this kind 
of conversation, the world is a "sight to dream 
of, not to tell." 

To be sure, there are Hamlets in the world ; 
but there are many gay and delightful persons 
upon the stage as well. We have lost Shake- 
speare's wisdom of attaching a fool to our own 
tragic persons to sound a counterblast to tragic 
seriousness. Even if the world were a Hamlet 
world, the "pale cast of thought" would be 
the very last mood in which to conquer it. In- 
trospection in the face of a stern demand often 
means instant loss or death. As a schoolboy 
said the other day, "If you go into a Harvard 
entrance exam, thinking how much depends on 
it, you're gone !" Here we men and women 
are in this world, with absolutely not a word 
to say about our coming. Suppose an option 
had been given us, would it not have been too 
serious a thing to undertake? This happy 
irresponsibility of birth might well set the 
example for our attitude to some of the 
larger aspects of our personal life. 

But is there to be no thinking, no silent 

piety, no wrestles in the cheerless hours of 

dawn, no excursion into the world of elevated 

thoughts or noble suffering ? Yes, there are 

[14] 




THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



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to be excursions thither, adventures, too, hair- 
breadth escapes, and sometimes no escape. 
But the neurasthenic mood of much of our 
contemporary life makes traveling in this 
adventurous region mortally dangerous, just 
as Hamlet's mood ends the play in a river of 
blood. The tools are for the man who can 
handle them. And the world of speculative 
sorrow is only for the man who enters it with 
the largest hopes and the greatest faith, and 
also, let it be said, with an inextinguishable 

Another contemporary misery is the dispo- 
sition of Shylock, which, at bottom, is a mood 
of avaricious literalism. Once men thought 
of the ludicrous nature of this "Judas- Jew," 
— a nature that probably in Shakespeare's 
day appealed to the mob as a broadly comic 
disposition ; but now we incline to take it more 
seriously. See how helpless his literalism was 
when it left the world of trade-balances and 
nominated bonds and had to interpret Jes- 
sica's waywardness and Portia's smiles ! For 
this world of ours is not a literal world. It is 
no prison-house of the soul, pushing its rough 
surface in upon the tender prisoner. "Hard 
and fast" is the last thing we can say about it. 
Even the ancient Heraclitus saw more truly 
that it was a "flux." Men have suffered mon- 
strously from the acute mania of literalism, 
measuring their wealth to discover that they 
were poor and the world stern and unsweet- 
ened. Their stupid obstinacies would make 
Jove laugh. They will not see beyond the 
length of their nose. They deny the existence 
[15] 




THE MYSTERY 



PEACE 




of " the seacoast of Bohemia." The other day 
a love romance from a public library fell casu- 
ally into my hands. On the margin at frequent 
intervals were sour commentaries on the hero 
to the effect that he was only a poor creature, 
and that men in general were fools, saved 
only from emotional damnation by some wom- 
anly deity. A later reader had scribbled over 
these comments, "What love-lorn old spinster 
has been mouthing here?" The spinster's 
comments were doubtless true ; but abstract or 
general truth was not the meaning of the nov- 
elist. What he meant to do was to lay out a 
delightful country, and then to ask elderly 
spinsters or others to walk in it for an after- 
noon. Why could not the love-lorn one have 
stepped into his midsummer world for a 
moment? No, she preferred the wintry dis- 
content of bleak literalism. 

In religion this mood has been suicidal of 
delight. Unnumbered scholars have painfully 
calculated exactly when the end of the world 
should be. A lumbering procession of pedants 
has made itself unhappy by literal interpre- 
tations of poetry and prophecy. Generations 
have wrestled with the needless question of 
the "fate of the heathen world before the 
gospel came." And to-day the same mood 
makes cowards of us all ; we see the lions in 
the way, but not the chains that hold them, 
least of all the Celestial City beyond. Mean- 
while God has mercifully so disposed our 
world that we never can take the pound of 
flesh without drawing blood. Our literal 
world is imposed upon by a world of glory. 

« [16] 



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THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



To the poet, London with all its sordidness 
and squalor becomes a sight touching in its 
majesty, when the beauty of the morning is 
upon it, as well as in the poet's heart. 

If we still follow the clue of Shakespearian 
tragedy, — and we do well to choose these 
typical examples, — we find still other foes 
within. Take Othello's mood of unreasoning 
suspicion and jealousy as the counterpart of 
many a life. Jealousy brings agony as a flood- 
tide, washing out the ancient landmarks ; and 
it is peculiarly strong because it comes as the 
accompaniment of a great and noble feeling. 
As several old authors have observed, love is 
an "aromatic pain." It contains the seeds of 
madness ; it is the very stuff of tragedy, when 
the under side pushes through the upper. And 
often men and women like ourselves, utterly 
unable to play the hero, yet have had some 
inklings of the terrors of Love when it becomes 
an Inquisitor. Friends have separated be- 
cause one was called and the other left. Public 
men, once friendly, once companions in arms, 
have at last opposed one another to the death, 
because one gained what the other could never 
attain. Private persons, in little communities, 
living in a retired Cranford, have yet had sus- 
picions, and edged animosities against their 
fellows. Politics, learning, business, society, 
the Church, all are fields where this unsalu- 
brious air may blow dangerously on weak 
brows. And even in families jealous minds 
separate to the dividing asunder of spirit from 
spirit. This close world, fevered and fanatic, 
is to be avoided at any cost. Iago is the devil 
[17] 



MYSTERY 



PEACE 



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himself of jealousy. Our peace is gone for- 
ever if we adopt a too extreme privateness, or 
treat our dearest friends as entities without 
delicate relations to us and in us. We are to 
step as far as we can over the narrow seas 
that enisle us; we are to love our neighbor 
as ourselves, and give him his prerogative of 
frankness. One word spoken in love, in 
tears, or in repentance, might often bind up 
our broken peace for us. Unspoken, we are 
left to sail a bitter sea, where under dark 
and sinister skies we come to the City of 
Disenchantment. 

Ambition is another foe that dwells within 
and often spoils our peace. In Macbeth the 
mood is urged to the blackest extreme ; yet, in- 
cipiently, as a contagion, it often marks the 
day we live in to no ordinary degree. Fame, 
according to Milton's austerer judgment, is 
the last infirmity of noble minds; but its 
cheaper form of notoriety is the first infirmity 
of baser natures. Ambition is strong meat to 
feed on. By that sin fell the angels, and by it 
fall many of those who are "a little lower than 
the angels." Though men may be saved from 
overt transgression through ambition, they yet 
surely spoil their peace as they incontinently 
nurse it. When ambition sets a hard pace, 
quietness can be no bride. "To succeed!" is 
the cry to-day, taught our youth, laid out in 
homilies, supported by philosophy, urged with 
Darwinian conclusiveness as a "law of the 
survival of the fittest." 

And evidences of success are all about us. 
Men crowd into the hall of fame, which has 
[18] 




THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



recently sometimes turned out to be a different 
place from the one they sought, since it had no 
egress again into the free world and open 
street. There are " successful " men in prison ; 
and others who are even worse off, pilloried by 
public opinion. Do we know that this empha- 
sis on success spoils our peace ? For the next 
generation, if we go on, peace will be one of 
the lost arts reckoned in with the dim memo- 
ries of a prehistoric civilization. It hardly fits 
even our rapid day, as the drama of gain 
moves on with faster and faster movement. 
And then success is a paradox. Shakespeare 
marked this in burning letters in Macbeth. It 
aims at reputation, but it loses character to 
get it, and the reputation turns out to be 
vastly different from the one sought at the 
start. There is a "damned spot" in it that 
does not wash out. The struggler always fails 
at the crucial moment. What usurper ever 
found his throne a place of state and strength ? 
— did he not find it precisely the weakest spot 
in all his dominions ? The high churchman, 
too, whether Archbishop of Canterbury or a 
deacon of a country congregation ruling by 
ambition, always rules once too much. In the 
meantime where is peace ? For the last shall 
be first, and the first last. 

There is one more foe in the household, the 
last and greatest, because entrenched in the 
deepest sanctuary. It is so complex that 
Shakespeare has chosen one of his simplest 
characters — that is, his most elemental — 
to portray it, — King Lear. The mood of 
Lear is a compound of demanding love and 
[19] 




MYSTERY 



PEACE 






passionate intensity of distrust. It desires 
and doubts at the same time. 

Here indeed is the deepest abyss men can 
tread. Childe Roland, riding through the sod- 
den marsh of Browning's wonderful scenery, 
still has faith enough to blow the bugle when 
he reaches the Dark Tower. But Lear upon 
the heath stands denuded of everything. 
Blasts and fogs are upon him. Oak-cleaving 
thunderbolts shake about his white head. 
Even his poor fool is hanged. He is without 
God and without hope. I know nothing that 
shows the horror of a naked universe as this 
monstrously elemental play of Shakespeare. 
One passage in the Gospels has something 
of its awful spaciousness as it says of 
Judas, "He then having received the sop 
went out straightway: and it was night." 

The pity of it all is that it is needless, — 
needless for Lear, and for us. We are not 
driven into this bleak world by necessity. We 
need not stretch the dominant note of love to 
selfishness. Sons have been driven into a 
far country by the exactions of parental love. 
Love does not live upon its demands, but upon 
its offers. Would Shelley have been quite as 
fantastic if his father had been more reason- 
able ? Strange words these, that I transcribe 
from a distant century, uttered by a saint, 
and spoken of a father who loved unwisely: 
"Hear all ye, and understand: — until now 
have I called Peter Bernardone my father, but, 
for that I purpose to serve the Lord, I give 
back unto him the money, over which he was 
vexed, and all the clothes that I have had of 
[20] 




THE MYSTERY 



PEACE 



him, desiring to say only, 'Our Father, which 
art in heaven,' not 'my father, Peter Bernar- 
done.' " So spoke Francis of Assisi. 

On the other hand sons have asked too much 
from their fathers. Men ask too much from 
God ; and then, because the gift is withheld, 
they doubt his love. Faith vanishes when men 
ask for immediate ends, and too urgently. 
The Kingdom is not to be taken with violence. 
Passion has unsettled men's faith more than 
ever thought has. Systems of philosophy, or, 
what is commoner, systemless philosophies, are 
apt to grow out of a man's life. There have 
been fierce believers who were just as dan- 
gerous to the peace as fierce doubters. Some 
of us make a world that moves onward, un- 
rolling the chapters of faith ; others among us 
unmake the world already delivered to them. 
And no surer way is there of spoiling our de- 
light than to love to the extremity of demand, 
— to ask ever and ever higher terms of alle- 
giance. This is to stand at last upon the heath 
with Lear. Whatever the final world is that 
we stand in, it is ours. We made it ourselves ! 






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THE MYSTERY 



PEACE 



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THE BEATIFIC VISION 



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VIDENTLY, to judge by the foregoing 
examples, one of the insistent needs of life is 
peace. But what is peace ? We do well to ask 
the question, for men who have sought it have 
not always looked in the right place for it. 
They have taken similitudes and dreams for 
the reality. Or they have come to a door for 
which, like Omar Khayyam, they "found no 
key." This excellent thing seems difficult to 
attain. 

Certainly peace is not obtuseness. Though 
the man in the ditch may never have the 
tremors of soul that we have, and only be sub- 
ject to the pangs of hunger and the pains of 
weariness, it is not therefore true that he 
achieves peace. For peace does not belong 
to the region of sensation. We speak of 
"peaceful" cattle in the meadows, but this is 
only the license of poetry. Those who are not 
subject to agony can never attain to peace. 
The One, indeed, who carried its most awful 
weight, had the most peace to give. 

Hence, all "returns to Nature" to find 
peace are beside the mark. Idyllic styles of 
existence are only momentary, — and imag- 
inative. Yonder thatched cottage, where love 
alone would seem to be enough to dower its 
poetical seclusion, is damp and unsanitary, 

[my 




THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



and its inmates are bent with rheumatism. 
Touchstone said truly of the "life of nature," 
"Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I; 
when I was at home, I was in a better place." 
The mind grows dull and dispirited in a world 
of simple elements; or else, if it keeps its 
powers, it still has room for exquisite pains, as 
Rousseau discovered in his Hermitage. 

Nor is peace that gentle pensiveness that 
soothes us for a while as we read certain books, 
or listen to the garrulity of reminiscent age. 
Rogers' Poems and Gray's Elegy are inter- 
pretations of life that have a certain value and 
afford a moment's rest by the way. But who- 
ever looks at life steadily cannot be wholly 
satisfied with these conceptions of human ex- 
istence. For the elegiac mood only has to do 
with the past, and the concluded. It looks 
thoughtfully over the closed chapters of life. 
But we still live, and hot demands are 
upon us. 

Likewise peace is not tranquillity, which was 
the Stoic end in life; for, as we have seen, 
this meant the rejection of much that added 
glory to life, and left the tranquil soul to stand 
on some frosty peak in godlike isolation. 
There is, indeed, some inhumanity in the 
position as set forth in Lucretius, who stood 
unmoved upon the moral heights and con- 
soled himself that at least he was not one of 
the wandering multitude below. Such pru- 
dent husbanding of emotion makes the full- 
blooded man contemptuous of the noblest 
Stoic achievement. Besides, the Stoic achieve- 
ment was always tainted with pride. Stoic 
[23] 



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THE MYSTERY 



PEACE 



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morality is only for men who are born aristo- 
crats and mean to keep their aristocracy. 

Peace is not so much an achievement as a 
gift. Jesus said to his disciples, "Peace I 
leave with you ; my peace I give unto you : not 
as the world giveth, give I unto you." In a 
true sense peace is catching. This makes it 
worlds apart from Stoic tranquillity, whose 
method was separation, even isolation. The 
method of peace is contact. It is found in the 
midst of the world of things and of persons, at 
the heart indeed of endless agitation. See how 
contagious peace is when a crowd is stricken 
into frenzy and one heroic soul calls out, "All 
is well !" The surge of trampling multitudes 
stops in a moment, and what was a brutal mob 
becomes reordered into society. 

Thus you cannot have peace in an unsocial 
world. For peace depends on contacts, rela- 
tions, and has as its work the due ordering of 
life. The old Pax Romanorum was mechan- 
ical and repressive, just as feudalism was. 
Men were held in place by an iron law of sov- 
ereignty. Or, a wilderness was made by con- 
quest, and that was called peace. But we 
know that peace cannot come in this fashion. 
Peace in society does not come lastingly from 
armed readiness, not even from protocols and 
constitutions, but from the social contacts of 
man with man. 

Even so, the peace of the heart is not me- 
chanical. It does not come from "trentals 
rightly read," or rosaries of prayers, or tithes, 
or the fulfilling of a nominated law. It comes 
from contact with Jesus, and with the life that 
[24] 

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THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 

he delivered to men. When religious people 
are not "happy," it is because they have lost 
this contact by worldliness ; or when, by stern 
endeavors, they try to conquer peace instead 
of receiving it as a gift. The fierce concentra- 
tion of Puritan zeal is at one with the cloistral 
emaciation of monasticism in missing the 
way; and it may appear to another age that 
the pallid insistence of an extreme evangelic- 
alism is equally astray from the magnificent 
humanity of the Way of Jesus. For there is a 
wise receptiveness that gets at substantive 
values, when a more active probing of spiritual 
mysteries kills them. Peace comes thus as a 
gift ; it is one of life's final terms and disposi- 
tions. To walk with Jesus, to seek his ends, 
to love his Father — this is the way of peace. 

This, however, is not a mystic doctrine of 
indolence. For the most flaming and intense 
souls have found peace. It is not stagnation. 
The gift needs exercise. Peace is an imperial- 
ism of the soul that seeks new lands to colonize. 
It opens up universal horizons. As Madame 
Guyon said of her own life when she found it, 
"It is a new country." The old factors are 
there ; but the landscape differs, for the new 
light throws out into impressive significance 
the forgotten meanings of human life. In the 
press and crowd about Jesus, the chief factors 
to the disciples were the grown people; but 
Jesus took a child and set him in the midst, 
and ever since heaven has been linked with 
the childlike heart. Palestine became a "new 
country" to the disciples; so did the hard 
Roman world to Paul ; so have the Orient and 
[25] 






*, 



V 




* 




the isles of the sea to men of our own day who 
followed peace. 

There are difficulties, dangers in the way, 
some losses and abnegations; but there has 
always been for those who were honest with 
Jesus a deep power of joy in action, so that 
peace came as a gift and crown of life. Poets 
and moralists have told us of "the dreary in- 
tercourse of common life," of "the daily 
round, the trivial task," of "the letter that 
killeth," but Jesus has told men of the abun- 
dant life with its superb relations of univer- 
sality and its inner gift of peace. And when 
men have been near enough to Jesus to catch 
something of his passion for the divine, so far 
they have found peace. 

When Jesus said that he "left" peace with 
his disciples, he evidently entrusted it to them 
as stewards. They were to use it, to exercise 
it, to make it bring forth fruit. But the use of 
gifts is notoriously difficult, as the parables of 
the talents well show. How shall peace be 
used? Suppose a man has "caught" peace 
from Jesus, how shall he apply his reenforced 
life? 

Perhaps the nearest answer that we can 
give is to say : The business of peace is to in- 
crease the spiritual equilibrium of men. The 
peacemaker is to be the man who makes two 
to be one, the many to be unity, the divided self 
to be completely whole. And what an enor- 
mous field of activity stretches before us as we 
look over our contemporary life ! Is not the 
cry of men "in widest commonalty spread" a 
cry for peace ? Who are to resolve the antago- 
__ [ 26 ] 

00 ™ T3§0fgjrair>«, 






THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 

nisms of society but new saviors who are re- 
incarnations of the Christ? I think of the 
speculative controversies concerning the reso- 
lution of "the one" and "the many" not yet 
ended, but threshed out with flails in the 
"pragmatic" discussions of the day. I think 
of the lurid colors of history as conquerors 
tried to make an end of this matter in political 
society. I am haunted by ghostly faces that 
peer out on us from cloister traceries as men 
strive to subdue the human and give place to 
the divine in the "narrow mansion" of a 
human heart. And I see that on the whole 
men have failed because they won too well. 
Even well-meaning men have lost their way. 
For they have insisted in making the world 
one of predominants instead of peradven- 
tures, — of fast conclusiveness instead of 
happy equilibrium. A modern wit has hit off 
the matter by saying that the ancient rule was 
"Nothing in excess," while the modern one 
is "Nothing but excess." And excess rather 
than equilibrium has been the note of much 
living even within the large enclosure of the 
Christian faith. Excess, however, has its re- 
actions, and those reactions plunge men into 
despair. In short, they lose their peace. 

Peace, then, works through equilibrium, and 
nowhere more than when it works within a 
man's own heart. A truce forever to the old 
antagonisms of " other- worldliness " and pure 
"worldliness" ! Heart of mine! it is the 
human and the divine you are to correlate, 
not the divine alone, not the human alone. 
Peace has often been set down in merely 
[27] 



U 



THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



iA 



^ 



M 



Hebrew terms, or theological, or moral ; but 
is it not racial and human ? Is peace only 
peace when it wears the garb of the first cen- 
tury, or when it wears the older fashion still 
of immortality ? If peace is always exercising 
its gift, it must needs work with the tools at 
hand, and do the work demanded. In one 
age it exhorts Euodia and Syntyche to be of the 
same mind in the Lord; in another it may 
need to exhort two whole civilizations — the 
East and the West. It must not forget the 
concrete and present misadventures of life 
which grow out of the separation of the divine 
and the human. The worldly man can never 
frame a state because he misses God ; and the 
Puritan failed in England because he forgot 
man. And in one's own heart it is not God's 
life alone, nor my life alone, that furnishes the 
ground of peace, but God with us and in us. 

And last, peace is security of end. Jesus 
said that his peace was not as that of the world. 
The peace of the world is broken. It is always 
precarious, at the best. But the peace that 
Jesus proposes is secure. In just what way 
can we interpret this security ? 

We saw a moment or two ago that peace 
was a gift. It is caught from contact with 
Jesus. Now, when we get anything from 
those who have been our teachers, what is it ? 
Surely it is no bit of worldly wisdom, not even 
a system of thought, hardly a religious creed. 
It is a point of view — it is a vision. "He 
taught me to see things differently, — more 
adequately !" would be the highest praise we 
could give or take. And peace does this for 
[28] 




THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 



men. I do not wonder that for more than ten 
troubled centuries men sang of the "beatific 
vision " as the last great good of life. To see 
things, to reinterpret them with a divine last- 
ingness, — surely this is the end all men de- 
sire. To see a new heaven and a new earth 
was the equal desire of Aristotle and the 
Apostle John. 

For one thing, men see time differently if 
they have peace. Peace is a larger view of 
time. It asserts that there are "twenty-four 
hours in the day," and that life's motions 
should be tested by standards that go beyond 
the tyranny of the moment. How many 
wrongs have been done because men forgot 
the verdict of the centuries ! Many a pain 
has been needlessly borne because men forgot 
that the present is infinitely momentary. 
Time, in the large view, is a great healer and 
interpreter; it writes men's meanings as well 
as their epitaphs. It is precisely this eternal- 
izing of life that peace is busy about. With 
Spinoza it sees things under the aspect of 
eternity, and hence it brings the solace of 
God. " 

No less does peace enlarge one's view of 
space ; for the peaceful heart has sympathetic 
strength to go beyond the five continents and 
seven seas. Thus it forgets the tempests of a 
local life — the scandal of the street, the fol- 
lies of the platform, or the silly measurements 
of fashion. As the modern neurasthenic goes 
on a Mediterranean cruise "to get away from 
things," the peaceful heart "gets away" by a 
large look over earthly boundaries. It lives 
[29] 






/ 









THE MYSTERY OF PEACE 

in racial issues instead of those of individual 
life. Some of Paul's peace no doubt came 
from the vision of Europe that was given to 
him. "I must also see Rome," he said, and 
from Rome Jerusalem looked small. 

Above all, peace creates a new and present 
heaven. It feels and knows the life of God. 
Men used to suppose that to see God was to 
die. Ah ! we now know better ; to see God is 
to live ! Peace knows God, is sure of him, is 
the actual manifestation of his life. And in 
those memorable hours when the heart has 
been quieted by that which passes under- 
standing it has saluted the deepest mystery 
of life which is also its greatest joy: — 

"And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man 
cannot see; 
But if we could see and hear this Vision — were it 
not He?" 




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